


the hardest pill

by uswnt2017 (orphan_account)



Category: Women's Soccer RPF
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-03-05
Updated: 2017-03-05
Packaged: 2018-09-28 11:08:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,891
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10096943
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/uswnt2017
Summary: "'cuz even when I don't say love ya, I love ya"tobin moves on. alex pretends to do the same.





	

**Author's Note:**

> based on the song "molly" by lil dicky:
> 
> "man, this is the softest thing I've ever done  
> but it's about something pretty important to me  
> and that's you  
> and that's true  
> I really wish I didn't care about you anymore  
> but I do."
> 
> this is my first fic so I would really appreciate feedback!

When children are young, maybe four or five years old, they have to be taught that flames burn.

They don’t have any negative memories seared into their nervous system. They don’t flinch when they see a match struck because they don’t know that such a little wave of heat can leave a scar. And since they’re not aware of the bubbling pain of blisters, they’re completely unconcerned about steaming bathwater or red-hot stovetops.

But then, predictably and unflinchingly, there comes the first moment — a splash of water boiling in a pot, baby-smooth skin pressed momentarily to a burner — and the lesson is learned. Quickly, easily, smoothly.

It hurts, but we learn — don’t touch whatever is too hot to handle.

For Tobin, it took two times to learn not to touch what she couldn’t hold. The first was Alex and it all tasted like bubble gum, sweet and soft in the hesitant moments that it lasted. There was nothing particularly wrong with how they ended, except that it broke Tobin in a thousand silent ways that she never let Alex see. It’s okay, really, except when she catches a whiff of cinnamon donuts at a farmer’s market or hears that jumbled collection of minor chords on Megan’s guitar, and then she’s back to being a kid with too-long limbs who’s tumbling down, down, down for someone she’ll never have.

The second time hurt less but lasted longer, mainly because neither of them had anything to lose or anything else to do, and because filling her empty seconds with Shirley was easier than facing the homesickness aching in her belly. It was easier, too, to let her finger scroll further in her contacts when she felt the late-night need to give her past life a call. They fell apart and she wondered if they’d ever really fallen together.

She’s older now, not really wise but definitely not stupid. She doesn’t feel old, but there’s something in the way she moves through each day that feels stronger, more grounded, as if she’s rubbed down the impulses that used to define her to reveal something more truly herself.

And then Christen kisses her in the back of a grimy Chicago bar after a 1-1 draw and she wonders if she’s learned anything at all. 

Tobin knows better. Knows better than to watch the way that Christen runs her hands through her hair, fingernails brushing her jawline as her mind drifts away from a half second. Knows better than to order them both another drink — “One more round of jack and cokes” might be the phrase that invites her own unraveling. Knows better than to kiss back, especially with tongue, or to slide her hand to the strip of bare skin where Christen’s shirt is hiked up on her side.

She knows better. But with her world tipping on one side in the back of a shitty sports bar, that doesn’t keep her from reaching out towards that flame once again.

She is, in a word, fucked.

***

It’s the ocean, more than anything, that calls Kelley in the mornings. Today the breeze is softer than normal, pressing lightly against her cheek as she pads though the sand. She bought a coffee in the hotel lobby, and it’s a little watery, but she’s mainly just holding it for the warmth. She wanders until she finds somewhere to sit, the sun beginning its bold adventure across the sky, its light still weak and wavering in the early morning air.

“Mind if I join?” Alex’s voice is raspier in the mornings, and after several days of camp it sounds something close to raw. She takes the softness in Kelley’s shoulders as permission and sits, tucking her legs close to her chest and fiddling with a string from her hoodie.

This is her favorite version of Alex — in the early mornings, captured only minutes after awakening. In the mornings, Alex isn’t a star or a captain or a forward. She isn’t competitive or anxious or guarded. Dawn smooths all the rough edges that keep edging her further away, soften her at all angles. This morning she looks younger, and if Kelley squints she can almost make out the girl with pink pre-wrap who used to laugh hard enough to crinkle the corners of her eyes.

“I think I’m losing Tobin.” She says it out loud and Kelley wants to laugh, but she knows that she can’t, knows that the sound would be clipped and mature and aching with some type of bitterness that she’s not ready to admit yet. In her head, the should-have-been conversation plays out — “You lost her awhile ago. And me, too. You’ve been losing us all for so much longer than you’ll ever admit to yourself.” — but all she manages externally is a half-hearted hum of recognition.

“You knew that would happen eventually.” Kelley keeps her eyes fixed on the beach, if only because she can feel Alex’s eyes fixing on her, like a magnet drawing in a minuscule disaster. “She’s in good hands. If it makes you feel any better.”

“Yeah.” Alex lets out a sigh, deep, from her belly. There’s heat coming off of her body in waves, filling the chilled inches between their legs. Kelley ignores it. “It doesn’t.”

Kelley bites her lip. Pauses. She slept for almost 10 hours last night, yet somehow she feels exhausted already. It’s been awhile since she felt young around Alex, and that fact resonates with a dull ache in the space between her second and third rib.

“We should get back.” In a different time, there would be comfort in this conversation. Kelley would reach out and Alex would let her. They’d sit and watch the waves, fill the morning with their chatter. Instead, they walk back in silence, a dullness filling the space between as the sun rises and brings color to the morning.

***

After the first night, Christen panics. Of course. Typical. She would laugh at herself if she wasn’t, well, if she wasn't panicking so damn much. 

She fulfills pretty much every stereotype in the book, scurrying out of bed, falling into the wall as she tugs on her jeans, putting on the wrong shoe twice. It’s not until she’s shut the front door that Christen realizes the main flaw in her escape plan — she just ran out of her own apartment.

She runs anyways. It takes an hour and a half for Christen to to do the 5.5 mile loop around the lake near her house, mostly because she succumbs to her guilt at mile 3 and stops to buy coffee and bagels as a consolation when she returns. She spends that hour and a half trying to forget.

It was all a two-drinks-too-many haze but Christen still remembers, crystal clear, the feeling of Tobin shoving her against her bedroom wall, mouth dipped to suck lightly at the juncture of her throat, fingers moving hastily and yet gracefully to tug her jeans around her hips. She swears she forgot to breathe for at least three solid minutes, and when she did suck in a gasp she opened her eyes and caught the sight of herself in her mirror, hair messy and knuckles white as she clung to Tobin’s frame.

(she opened her eyes much later, when her legs were spread and her breath was ragged and Tobin was letting out slow moans of approval at the way her hips were canting with a rhythm that was all-too natural. now, in the morning light, she can’t dare to think of the shock that pulsed through her at the sight of Tobin’s fingers pressing in _just right_ because it might cause her to implode.)

Christen spends an hour and half trying to forget all of that, because it’s too much, too damn much to throw onto a teammate and a friend and it’s — it’s Tobin.

It’s Tobin, whose smile has made her stomach flip since she was a junior in college, whose hands have always been there to steady her and whose eyes have always found hers in the crowd of their teammates. And maybe she’s read too much into this all, but if she knows anything it’s that doing this with Tobin is nothing short of a disaster. Cataclysmic, actually. 

So she works up an apology, a speech that’s short and sweet and simple and kind, and it’s close to memorized when she walks through the door, but then Tobin is there, her face a kaleidoscope of shy surprise and untamed guilt and something softer, and Christen realizes with a jolt to her stomach—

She doesn’t want to forget.

***

“Do you think it’ll last?” Julie glances up haphazardly, dropping her gaze almost immediately back to the catalogue in her hands. She squints and hesitates for a half second longer before drawing a circle around a set of dishware and squiggling a question mark just above it.

“Do I think what will last?” She closes the catalogue and shoves it across the table to Christen, who sets down her coffee and flips to the first page.

“You and Zack.” The statement earns a quick glare from Julie and a hasty amendment from Christen. “I mean, obviously you think you will, I mean, you will—“

“What’s going on?” She leans over and grabs her own cup of coffee, sipping at it as she inspects Christen, her hunched shoulders, the teeth gnawing slightly on her lip.

“Nothing.”

Christen has been more reflectful lately, and happier too. Julie’s noticed a light in her, soft and warm, but there's a subtlety in the shift that’s kept her from asking questions until now.

“You sure?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s nothing?”

“Nothing.”

They sit in a silence that’s almost comfortable, Julie watching Christen as she picks at a fingernail wordlessly.

“How soon did you know? With Zack?”

“A week or two.”

“That soon?”

Julie shrugs, watching as Christen presses her lips tighter together.

“When you know, you know.”

***

_Can you talk?_

The text sends Tobin’s phone skittering slightly across the countertop. She jumps, then puts down her yogurt and calls. She’s never been one to leave Alex hanging.

“Hi.” The voice sounds like a stranger, like a voicemail saved years ago. It feels like a childhood home. Tobin wonders if she’ll ever grow out of her inability to keep from smiling at the way Alex’s voice curls at both ends.

“Hey you.” She shifts the phone to her other ear as she lets herself outside, swinging her legs over the side of the porch. “What’s up?”

“Just wanted to talk.” Alex heaves a sigh. There’s a game on in the background, but she can tell it’s not soccer so Tobin doesn’t bother to ask which one. Another beat of silence fills the thousands of miles between them. “Miss you.”

She used to add another syllable to the start of that sentence, used to follow it up with stories, used to fill every second of these phone calls with little words of adoration. Even after it all crumbled, Alex used to be affectionate to a fault. This is some different kind of after — not the “after” that follows a break up, but the “after” that comes when two people who couldn’t live without each other move on to lives that somehow are sweeter than the ones they imagined together.

“Miss you, too.”


End file.
